Lux Feminae (est. 2022) is proud to present Vita Dopo Vita at Galerie Derouillon, our first Paris-based exhibition, curated by Olivia Zabludowicz, Nadia Hejailan, and Lily Cohen. The exhibition will open on the 21st of February, headlining works by Daniele Toneatti and Ala d’Amico, and featuring a new mixed work by photographer Hedi Stanton.
Vita Dopo Vita, Italian for « Life After Life» explores the iterative nature of artistic production, where memory and historical references serve as catalysts for transformation. Through practices of repetition and reengagement, the artists recontextualize familiar imagery, transforming past subjects to uncover new possibilities within existing materials in order to construct layered and evolving forms. The exhibition considers the materiality of art-making and the ways in which memory is altered through its reproduction. Each composition—given a new Life—reshapes the subject into something entirely new while carrying traces of its origins, ensuring its immortality not as static memory, but as a dynamic, living process.
Daniele Toneatti (b. 1989 Schio, Italy), engages with art making from a perspective both analytical and emotional. Working with source material culled from disparate sources, ranging from stock photography to art historical references as well as personal photographs, he collects images that he reinterprets and samples into compositions that hybridise techniques, where painting, photography, collage and drawing are combined. Toneatti approaches painting from a singular polarising perspective; the formal diversity of the work itself indicates that each painting is an individual response to its source material, where its painterly reproduction ranges from intuitive and sketch-like to methodically executed. Drawing links between found imagery, spontaneous mark making and individualised painterly processes, his practice explores the conditions of the birth of an image and its methods of interpretation. Toneatti studied Fashion at Central Saint Martins, London (2014) and had solo shows with Open Forum, Berlin (2023) and Peres Projects, Milan (2024).
Ala d'Amico (b. 1985, Rome, Italy) is an Italian Brazilian artist and founder of ORME, an experimental printmaking studio. Fearing that the constant proliferation of new images would only nullify them, d'Amico became interested in existing images' lives, studying their possibilities for transformation on a formal and conceptual level. The artist asks herself what is, or what could be, the life of an image. The silkscreen technique becomes the pertinent medium for exploring the dualism between a new and appropriate image. Both analog and digital reproduction methods are used in her works; the images also often come from different sources, such as history books, stills from TV newscasts, and scientific texts, appropriating them in dialogue with personal images within new compositions to emphasize alternative narratives and possibly uncover latent meanings. d'Amico received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York in 2016 and her BFA from the University of the Arts London.
Hedi Stanton (b. 1998, New York, New York) is a multidisciplinary artist and portrait photographer. Stantons decicions around her framing demonstrates work as equal an instrument as the photographic work itself. She now lives and works between New York and Paris..
